Wind Walker

by Terry C. Johnston

  He followed the half dozen boot tracks to the carcass, saw how the man had walked right up to the docile animal, then slashed its neck then and there. There was a dribble of blood where the boot tracks ended, then cowprints as the animal stumbled sideways, flinging its head and blood in both directions until it fell several yards from where the boot tracks ended. Titus stepped beyond the last of those prints, right over to the cow, and knelt beside its head. He held out his left hand, fingertip tapping the wide puddle of dark brown molasses beneath the carcass.

  Cold. A little gummy beneath the crusty surface. But soaked into the ground and hard for the most part.

  Wiping his fingers across the gritty soil, he stood and turned back for the horse. Shoving his right foot into the wide cottonwood stirrup, Scratch heaved himself into the saddle and shifted the big .54 across his thighs. Things did not look good for Roman.

  Whoever it was came out here did this sometime after dark last night. This killing wasn’t done in the last few hours. The lone horseman had wrangled the cow away from the rest of the stock, then herded it over two hills and into the bottom of this draw. When he finally had the animal boxed at the head of the draw, he had dismounted and slit its neck.

  Things did not look good for Roman Burwell at all.

  Slamming his heels into his horse’s ribs, Titus Bass tasted the sour burn of dread rising in his throat with the burn of gall.

  “If You really do listen to folks,” he whispered bitterly as he reined directly up the side of the coulee, “then I want You to listen to me. You can’t do this to Amanda. Can’t take Roman from her like this.”

  He suddenly saw Shad appear at the top of the next hill, farther south than he would have thought to look, but back in the direction that unknown rider would have herded the cow. Sweete yanked his reins to the side, hard, forcing his horse to make a circle, then a second tight circle as he held his rifle high in the air. When Shad stopped after that third circle, he pointed with his rifle and kicked his horse into motion down the side of the draw. Titus hammered his horse into a gallop a heartbeat later. They both reached the body about the same time.

  That’s when he raised his eyes to the sky and whispered again, but only one word this time, “P-please.”

  Finding it hard to breathe, Titus was the first to leap out of his saddle, sprinting those last few yards toward the gnarled, wind-sculpted cedar where Roman Burwell was tied—his arms outstretched, legs spread-eagled. His shirt had been ripped from his shoulders and hung in tatters from the high waist of his drop-front, button-fly britches. From the bruises up and down the washboard of muscles rippling over his chest and belly, it was plain to see they had done their best to break the man’s ribs. And that gave him hope as he lunged to a stop a foot away from the body.

  He grabbed a handful of thick hair on Roman’s brow, pulled the head back so he could peer into the face. The eyes barely fluttered. By damn—he was still alive!

  Sweete was trudging up behind him, swinging that big .62-caliber flintlock side to side as he covered Titus’s back. For a heartfelt moment, Bass looked at the sky once more. “Thankee. Thankee more’n You’ll ever know.”

  “He breathin’ any?” Shad asked quietly.

  “Some,” he answered. “Barely. Roman?” Then he thought and told his friend, “Cut ’im down, Shadrach. I’ll hold him up best I can while you cut—”

  “He’s a big lad, Titus,” Sweete volunteered as he stepped right against Bass and propped his .62 against the foot of the cedar. “Lemme hold him and you cut the ropes.”

  Soon as he dropped his rifle against a clump of sage, Scratch slashed through the narrow rope that held the legs spread; then as he cut through the bonds around the wrists, the body sank from sheer exhaustion and the relentless tug of gravity.

  Sweete supported Burwell in his arms as Titus dragged the farmer’s legs out to the side. “Like they was crucifying him, Scratch. Tied him up this’a way—like they was crucifying this poor man.”

  “Cruci—” he repeated with a grunt as he helped Shad ease the big farmer’s body down onto the rocky ground. “What’s that?”

  “Way they done to Jesus when they kill’t Him.”

  Titus slipped the blade of his knife under the greasy strip of cloth the attackers had tied around Burwell’s mouth. “Jesus, that fella in the Bible?”

  Shad scooted back on his knees and laid a hand on Roman’s chest. “That’s Him. My mama always wanted me to know that story. How the man’s enemies hung Him on a cross. Died. Later He come back to living for all time.”

  As he slowly patted Burwell’s cheeks, Titus said, “I ’member how my ma told us young’uns that story over an’ over too. Damn—wish I’d brung some water with us.”

  “I’ll go fetch some,” Sweete volunteered but hesitated to move.

  Scratch laid his ear against Roman’s bare, blood-crusted chest. Then lifted his eyes to Shad’s. “We need to get him back.”

  “How?”

  For a moment he cogitated on it, staring at the two horses. “He’s a big chunk. You think you can hold ’im up?”

  “Alone? On my horse?”

  “Ain’t gonna work,” Titus agreed. “G’won back to the wagon. They got them ridgepoles lashed under the belly. Bring a pair of my woman’s buffler robes too, an’ two or three coils of rope.”

  “Rawhide all right?”

  “Any rope—buffler, rawhide—just be quick about it.”

  Sweete clambered to his feet, swept up his .62, then paused a moment before he laid it back against the clump of sage beside Bass’s. “You keep that. I got my belt guns along. I best leave that’un with you … ’case someone shows up.”

  Scratch shook his head. “Ain’t no one gonna come back, Shadrach. They left him for dead after they beat him. Cowards like them, they’re long gone now.”

  The big man’s face hardened like stone. “You an’ me both know who it was.”

  “Maybe not the three or four of ’em it took to drag the man down,” Bass said, holding up one of Burwell’s hands, studying the raw, bloodied knuckles. “From the looks of the scuffle, they didn’t have a easy time of it. One of ’em’s gotta have some bruises too. I figger that’s why they beat him so bad—even after he couldn’t fight back no more.”

  Sweete stood over them, casting a wide shadow on Titus. “How they get him down?”

  “Back of his head’s crusted with blood. They laid him out with a gun butt, maybe whacked ’im with a rifle barrel. Only way them bastards make a big corncracker like this to drop to his knees.”

  “I’ll be back quick’s I can,” Shad promised.

  Titus only nodded, watching his friend jump astride the big horse and saw the reins around in a tight circle, the animal lunging away with a grunt.

  When he looked back down, he saw that the new sunlight was starting to reach Burwell’s eyes. He shifted a little so he could keep the face in some shade. Swollen, cracked lips. Puffy eyes. Tiny cuts on the brow and cheeks, blood crusted in the six-day-old stubble on his chin. The wounds had hardened, their dribble almost completely dry. Hadn’t been that long ago the attackers had approached the farmer, likely claiming they had come to help him find the cow that was already drawing flies and dung beetles farther up the draw.

  As he held Roman Burwell across his thigh, out there a few yards away Titus saw the scuffed ground where the struggle had taken place. Likely one had come up behind Roman as he struggled with one or more of them at his front, at least from the way the ground was trampled. And it was easy to see from the knees of his britches that the farmer had his legs knocked out from under him. But he was still alive.

  That’s when Titus looked back at the aching blue of that midsummer sky, cloudless, flawless, pristine, and pure. He had never asked anything of the First Maker, of his mother’s Creator, from the God of Brigham Young’s Saints, nothing for himself. Never had he asked, much less pleaded and begged the way he had this morning. When it came down to asking on behalf of someone else,
Titus Bass would not hesitate to plead and beg. He was not ashamed as he cradled his son-in-law in his arms and shooed the annoying flies from the oozy wounds. He was not ashamed that he had asked for the help of a power far greater than he. Too many of those he had known did believe—be they the women of his Johnston clan back in Boone County. Or be they the shamans and rattle-shakers of the Ute, Shoshone, or Crow clans he had wintered among. They had a different One, but he figured it had to be the same One in the end.

  More and more of late, he had felt the presence of something greater than himself.

  In his coming to this country, Titus Bass had first sensed how his heart sang with the endlessness and exquisite beauty of the land, both plains and mountains. For a long time, he hadn’t realized that the feeling making his heart swell had really been the One talking to him, those first simple words he could not recognize, much less understand. It was only the utter freedom, the timelessness of each new bend in a creek or the view from the crest of a hill just topped. For a long time, Scratch had only thought the music he felt in his heart was merely the fact that he was here and now in a place few would ever see.

  But there was the God-talkers, old friends like Asa McAfferty and Bill Williams—circuit-riding preachers who, although they had strayed from the path, nonetheless laid claim to the impossible, so much of the impossible that Titus Bass could only have doubted all the more the presence of any spiritual force in all of this wildness … be it the nature of the wilderness itself before the coming of man, or the nature of man alone and unfettered in that wilderness. Those who claimed to believe, be they white or red, they were merely superstitious, and maybe to be pitied for their scary beliefs. He himself was not helpless in the face of what might confront him. He had stood tall and bold against the wind—and survived without clinging to a superstitious belief in something he could not see.

  Then he had held his baby daughter in his hands. And over the next few weeks he listened to Waits-by-the-Water tell him more and more about the One Above, the First Maker, the Grandfather, each day as they plodded north from Taos, making for that next rendezvous on Ham’s Fork of the Green in ’34. By the time he had truly heard his daughter’s name whispered in the softness of the breeze that caressed his face, Titus Bass had taken that first step in admitting to himself that there was something far more powerful than man himself, something far greater than this wilderness that challenged his courageous breed. Perhaps … just perhaps there was some force that had created him and this land, a power that had pulled him west into this uncompromising garden of beauty and sudden death where he could no longer deny its existence.

  How, he thought, could he have ever gazed up at the tall and hoary peaks of these Rocky Mountains, still mantled with snow in the heat of summer here far below, and not admit that there was some great life force that had created all of this? How could he have ever lain on his back, elbow curled beneath his head, and stared up at the night sky with its countless, numberless, infinite tally of stars and not accept that some great hand was at work in this world, if not at work in the tiniest recesses of his own insignificant heart?

  While a younger man, a man more prone to squinting out at the world around him through a cynical eye, might have determined that any belief in the spiritual was nothing more than a weak-minded person’s attempt to explain away a magician’s tricks or the vagaries of unexplainable happenstance … Scratch had simply had too damn much happen right before his eyes for him not to admit the presence of some all-powerful might at play here in this wilderness, where the trappings of civilized man and his society had not sullied this high and pristine world the way they had contaminated most everything back east. Leave it to others to refute the existence of a power outside themselves.

  Titus Bass had seen how a white buffalo calf robe told the old sightless Porcupine Brush that Scratch and the rest of Mad Jack Hatcher’s men were sorely in need of rescue from the Blackfoot days before the white men were attacked, telling Goat Horn’s Shoshone warriors they must ride hard and fast to save their trapper friends.*

  And Titus Bass had seen how some all-powerful spirit had worked its healing through Shell Woman to save Shadrach Sweete’s life. Even to turning that bloodied black hump fur carved off a buffalo cow into a strip of creamy-white hide—the color of which was more sacred than anything else to Shell Woman’s people.

  How could Porcupine Brush, blind and nearly deaf as well, have known the white men needed help, if he hadn’t been told by the First Maker through that sacred buffalo calf hide? And how was it that Shad’s unstoppable bleeding was healed and that makeshift wrap turned white if not through a power that answered Shell Woman’s fervent prayer, if not as an answer to Scratch’s own prayer to spare the life of his old friend? The two of them hadn’t talked about it much at all since that stormy night down on the South Platte. Some things a man found hard to describe, much less explain, even to himself, especially to others … no matter that they had gone through the very same experience together.

  So if not a man to pray for himself, eventually Titus Bass had begun to pray for others. To ask that the power of that great hand be brought to bear on the fortunes of those he loved and cared for. How he had asked to get Waits back from the Blackfoot. Prayed that the pox would not take her from him. Asked to be freed from the grip of the desert, and the Diggers, and the distance too. And how he had begged that Roman Burwell be spared to his family.

  In the end this simple man realized that what blessings were showered upon his loved ones would be showered upon him too.

  By the time they got Roman back to the wagon, even the train’s dust had disappeared from the horizon. By then, the two old friends had put hours of work behind them.

  Upon his return to the coulee, Shad explained he hadn’t wasted a lot of time when he rode up, yelling for their wives to fetch him the spare rope from the pack animals while he himself untied six of the hardwood ridgepoles from beneath the wagon box where Burwell kept them secured. They, and eight shorter poles, had been brought west with a large section of oiled Russian sheeting—kept in the event they needed additional shelter and had to erect a wall tent, or might use the extra canvas for repairs to the main wagon cover. With the two long poles tied into a V and four shorter ones quickly strapped across them, he laid the two buffalo robes over the back of the pack animal, then climbed into the saddle once more. That’s when he said Amanda had come running up, pleading with him to take her back to Roman.

  “I’ve got to see him!” she begged, gazing up at the tall man in the saddle.

  “Can you ride?”

  “I can ride.”

  As he began to turn, prepared to have his wife fetch up one of their saddle horses, Amanda pulled herself up atop that packsaddle frame to which he had lashed the improvised travois. “You ever ride ’thout a saddle?”

  “No,” she answered with determination. “But, I’ve never had my husband near get himself killed neither. Let’s go.”

  As soon as Shad and Amanda had neared the scene, Titus watched her pull back on the reins of that packhorse and leap off, her skirts a’swirl as she bounded to the ground and started leaping over the sage, dodging around the wind-stunted cedar.

  “Pa! Pa!” she cried, her cheeks streaked with moisture as she came sliding to her knees beside him. “Oh … Roman.”

  Gently, Titus pulled himself out from under Burwell and held Roman’s head up while she fit herself beneath his bare, bloodied shoulders. Bass got to his feet, feeling the cramped muscles protest in one leg where they had gone to sleep while he did what he could to shade his son-in-law from the cruel midsummer sun.

  “Here,” Shad called, then tossed Scratch an old oak canteen. “I brung that for Roman.”

  In turn Titus handed it over to Amanda and stepped back as he watched her drag up the end of her dress, then the bottom of her dirty petticoat. Onto a corner of this she carefully poured some water from the canteen, then dabbed it on the first of his cuts and puffy bruises.

>   “How far they ahead of us, by the time you got back?” Scratch asked.

  “Can’t see nothin’ of ’em no more,” Sweete admitted.

  Titus wagged his head, all the more angry for it. “Hargrove gonna make sure he covers ground today.”

  “Make it so we can’t catch ’em today, fast as he’s driving ’em,” Shad agreed.

  With a nod of recognition, Bass took a step toward Amanda, but Sweete caught his elbow and dragged him back.

  “Stay here with me awhile, Scratch. Ain’t nothing you can do for ’im right now.”

  “You’re right. But these hands what wanna choke those bastards need somethin’ to do,” Titus explained. “We need to be tying up a travois for Roman.”

  As they bent over their work repositioning the cross members, then started tying on the cradle of a double thickness of buffalo robes in which they would place the injured man, Sweete confessed, “I wanted to keep you over here, where your daughter couldn’t hear.”

  “Hear what?”

  “Hear us talk on what we’re gonna do about Roman an’ Hargrove, an’ them badger-eyed bastards done this to your daughter’s husband.”

  His hands stopped working at the series of knots and he stared at Sweete. “You’re in for making ’em pay for what they done to Roman?”

  “Even if I wasn’t your friend, I’d throw in with you just to have a chance to see their faces when they realize they ain’t getting away with treatin’ folks like this.”